Contest: Salt Lake City School District's: 2011 Cesar Chavez Creative Expression Art and Language Arts Competition
Genre: Essay or Poetry (Ms. Pierce will handle the visual arts portion)
Theme: "Leaders for Justice in our Community and World"
Prize: Certificates, publication, banquet.
Publication: www.slcschools.org, winning students will be invited to read their work aloud at a celebration
Odds of winning: ALL participants will receive a certificate for entering - LOVE THAT!
This contest is exclusive to our school district, so it is a much smaller scale. It's also a topic that is near and dear to my very large Latino population - Cesar Chavez. Last year, three of my students received honorable mentions in their categories and one student, a student who had been learning English for just six months, had his essay published in a district newsletter. This contest was a major influence in my decision to take on this project this year. My students enjoyed participating in this contest and were so excited that we had winners and got certificates.
Because of the overlapping time frames with the "ICE" contest, we had to knock this one out in just four days. I am so proud to say that every single one of my students wrote a rough draft and typed their final draft. All but one student had their essays submitted to the contest.
Last Friday, I drove the ICE submissions to the National Energy Foundation and the Cesar Chavez submissions to the school district. It was hectic pulling them all together on the same day and running them around town, but it was fun. The students are getting better at this process and I'm getting more organized about it, too. They groan every time I mention a new contest, but there is less and less dragging of feet to get them done. The quality of writing is, of course, improving, too.
Shout out to Jody Brings and Emily Pierce who had their students participate in the challenge as well. Emily and I share many students, so there were several who did art and essay submissions. Special thanks to my assistant, Carol Kelly, for helping glue and paperclip all the entry forms to the essays.
This next week is the UALPA, the state English test for English Language Learners. I can NOT wait to see how their writing scores improve. We also have two more writing contests coming up with deadlines just three days apart. With testing and two contests, I've been debating if I'm taking on too much by trying to do both contests. Since I'm still just working with one class of twelve students, I've decided to take it on. Why not? Maybe someone will win a fabulous prize!
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